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what is ruby or rails?

maybe im just dense but i havent heard anything about ruby or rails until recently....what is it? is it something i should know? is it clientside or serverside? do you need an IDE to develop with it? what is it primarily used for? what is it closest too......answers to any of my questions will be appreciated thanks!

AltoonaDesignFreelance Flex developer for hire.ActionScript Programmer with 8 Years Experience.

Ruby is a general purpose scripting language, like Perl or Python. It's cross-platform and can be used on Windows, Linux, OS X, etc.

Ruby on Rails is a web development framework written in Ruby. It competes with the likes of Struts (Java), Django (Python), etc. Its main purpose is to make web development easier by enforcing a set of standards and doing some of the lower-level work (i.e. sanitizing data for SQL queries) for you.

This is all server-side, but Ruby on Rails includes support for dynamically creating JavaScript code, which is client-side.

You don't need an IDE to develop with Ruby on Rails. A plain old text editor (preferably one that can do syntax highlighting) will work. If you do want an IDE, there's RadRails, which is free.

Ruby is a general purpose scripting language, like Perl or Python. It's cross-platform and can be used on Windows, Linux, OS X, etc.

Ruby on Rails is a web development framework written in Ruby. It competes with the likes of Struts (Java), Django (Python), etc. Its main purpose is to make web development easier by enforcing a set of standards and doing some of the lower-level work (i.e. sanitizing data for SQL queries) for you.

This is all server-side, but Ruby on Rails includes support for dynamically creating JavaScript code, which is client-side.

You don't need an IDE to develop with Ruby on Rails. A plain old text editor (preferably one that can do syntax highlighting) will work. If you do want an IDE, there's RadRails, which is free.

thanks, do you know if your can develop with ruby on rails using the dreamweaver 8 IDE? im not seeing an option for it, but maybe theres a plugin or something.

know any good sources for learning rails, from a "new to ruby, but not new to programming" ?

thanks.

AltoonaDesignFreelance Flex developer for hire.ActionScript Programmer with 8 Years Experience.